You do have some information. It would appear that you have four different locations a path could be present in. The following code uses that knowledge to pull out the user name from the proper location. 

# Offsets into the path
my %indexes = (home => 1,
               Users => 2,
               Home => 1,
               export => 2);

# This would be one of the scalars you have access to (I'm using the
# CGI-BIN one in this code.)
my $path = '/home/username/public_html/cgi-bin/dir';

# Remove the leading / and then split up
my @pieces = split('/', substr($path, 1));

# Extract the user name information
my $username = $pieces[$indexes{$pieces[0]}];
print "$username\n";

[download]

The %indexes variable holds the first part of the path as the key, and then the zero-based offset where the user name is stored after the path has been split.

In reply to Re: Matching a string that you do not have any really good information about by Belgarion
in thread Matching a string that you do not have any really good information about by jcpunk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.